Obama, That Genius

The best way to describe how I feel about the regime of Barrack Obama is to sigh and say "I'm so relieved that McCain lost." The only reason I'm comfortable with his victory is that through it we have been spared the atrocity of a McCain regime. I've always known that Obama is a pro-choice social democratic Zionist who would fund abortions and embryonic stem cell research with federal tax dollars and who would aid the State of Israel with virtually no condition. I've known since the general election debates that he would leave active U.S. military bases in Iraq indefinitely, and that he would surely increase the number of troops in Afghanistan. I've known since those debates that he would preemptively invade Pakistan, if need be. Until just recently I felt nothing but indignation for him. Now, however, I must color that indignation with a little admiration. His Infallible Excellency is reaching out beyond the anti-McCain mainstream to the fringe groups who stand for complete individual liberty, while maintaining his statist position.

His Excellency's firing of GM's CEO is an appeal not just to the anti-capitalist left, but also to those who believe in economic reponsibility. In demanding restructuring of the car company, he declared a concern that "the taxpayers'" money should not be spent to prop up enterprises that are bound to fail. Of course, if he really cared about the taxpayers' rightful relation to their money, then he would not fund his programs by threatening to imprison those who don't surrender portions of their goods. But since he knows his beloved power structure would not exist without theft, he distracts us with what looks like a blatant and sincere appeal to conservative sentiments. I fear he might be successful at securing apathy and maybe even sympathy from the limited government right. For this, he is a genius.

His Infallible Excellency also appeals to those radical individualists who believe we should be free to indulge in mind-altering drugs. Nevermind the fact that he's only allowing medical marijuana; look at the fact that he's considering our freedoms more than other people did, and that fewer people are now forced by government to endure physical pain. This is a blatant and seemingly-sincere appeal to sentiments that he does not have. A success at winning sympathy from those who are too honest to like him. This is another reason that he is a genius.

I am happy that His Excellency recognizes us now. But I fear that if we are too grateful for what he gives us, he would have his way with our future and leave us crying in the rain. And yet I have to give him kudos for managing to make his rule look like something it definitely isn't. He has successfully made his authoritarian government look like a protector of liberty.

Sexual Assault

The other day my dad, a guy named Bill, and I sat in on an Animal Law class at Cal. A lawyer from Peta was the guest lecturer, and she showed us footage of mistreatment at a pig farm. One of the things in the video was a worker telling another guy how he deals with stubborn sows. If she doesn’t move when he wants her to move, he takes the prod and shoves it up her anus. She always moves then. The lawyer called this a reference to “sexual assault”. But why call it sexual? What makes the forceful penetration of one orifice a sexual assault, and the forceful penetration of another orifice a non-sexual assault? Would it still be a sexual assault if a guy shoves a stick in a sow’s mouth? After all, oral can be just as sexual as anal. Should we include any other orifices besides the vagina, anus, and mouth? I can’t help remembering the sadistic curiosity that plagued me when I was a kid, when I took twigs and probed the insides of cats’ ears.

Really, any use of any body part can be sexual, if it’s done with a sexual drive. But shoving a stick up a pig’s backside to get it to move is not an act fueled by sexual drive. Maybe it’s fueled by a vicious hunger to dominate that is connected with other visceral drives, but this drive itself isn’t a sexual drive. A man can, acting under a sick urge to see others in pain, kidnap a girl, tie her to a post, and whip her. Maybe he likes the sight of blood, so he makes her wear a white dress, or strips her down to her panties, or to her skin. But his use of her body wouldn’t be a sexual use (and, assuming he lacks her consent, ab-use) unless it sexually stimulates or gratifies him. Merely using an organ that some would occasionally use for sex does not constitute a sexual act. And the forceful penetration of an orifice that some would penetrate for sexual pleasure, is not everywhere and in all cases a sexual assault.

Anyway, why should we care whether an act is sexual or not? What makes sexual assault wrong is not that it’s sexual, but that it’s assault. We don’t have to be calling abuses “sexual” for them to seem as abusive as they actually are. Whether a man gets a boner when he shoves a stick up somebody else’s anus isn’t exactly relevant. What matters is whether he has their consent. And it is this factor that we’ve been paying too little attention to. Western culture has for too long obsessed over whether an act is sexual, and has called both consensual and non-consensual acts “abuse” on the mere grounds that they have something to do with sex. And in this obsession western culture has let pass a whole host of humiliations and abuses that aren’t motivated by sexual desire. So it’s okay for a man to drag his daughter to those well-intentioned sadists in white jackets who we call “pediatricians”, who’ll make her take off all her clothes, touch her all over, and even pierce her with iron rods, and it’s okay to confine her for hours on end in those dayprisons we call “schools”, but it’s not okay at all when she lifts her skirt to a friend.

The Unconstitutionality of the Pledge

Sometime near the beginning of my senior year at UCSD, I found a table on Library Walk for College Republicans and asked when their next meeting was. I decided to attend at least one meeting, since after all, I am a registered Republican, and in a handful of issues I am very, very conservative. I was also a Ron Paul supporter, and I was anxious to know how well the mainstream right was progressing in issues like war and political authority.

So I arrived on the night they were meeting, and the very first thing we did after reorganizing the chairs to form a big circle was to stand and face a flag that a man had pulled from his bag, put our right hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I myself abstained from placing my hand over my heart and from saying a single word of the pledge, though I did stand out of some combination of respect and fear.

There are some words in the Pledge of Allegiance that I have a moral opposition to. Granted, I am a little put off by the phrase "under God". Does it mean that God chose this nation to be better than all the others? Does it mean that everything our leaders do happens to be condoned by God? Does it mean that acceptance of God's authority necessitates acceptance of the U.S. government's authority? Does it mean that we all have a national duty to worship a Biblical God? But that isn't what bothers me most. I can live with a little religious ambiguity. What bothers me most, and what I find to be inconsistent with both the United States Constitution and fundamental moral principles, is the phrase "On Nation, Indivisible".

The Right to Secede is a basic human right that belongs not just to the states, but to counties and cities within the states, to neighborhoods and to households, and to mere individuals. It was the Right to Secede that our forefathers claimed when they wrote: "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another". The Declaration of Independence was in every sense a declaration of the right to secede. When a man insists that we are bound perpetually in union with "one nation, indivisible", he denies the very principle on which our nation is supposed to have been founded. He basically says that we should stay loyal to the government no matter how high its taxes, unnecessary its wars, or brutal its so-called "justice".

The U.S. Constitution puts no limit on the states' or the people's Right to Secede, and so we can infer from the Tenth Amendment that the Right to Secede, which the Constitution does not prohibit to the states, is reserved for the states or the people. The Right to Secede is then a Constitutional right. Any law or government action prohibiting secession simply because it is secession is a denial of a Constitutional freedom, and any statement in denial of the Right to Secede is a statement in denial of the Constitution. Of course, the Constitution doesn't have any moral authority anyway, but it is nice to see statists trapped in their own words. If they are patriots, then surely they love "freedom" and the Constitution. If they love those two things, then surely they must give the Constitution the meaning that is most conducive to freedom. And if they do that, then they must acknowledge that no body of people is bound for all eternity to bow to some organization that calls itself "the United States Government".

Individual Sovereignty, Free Association, and the Inalienability of Will are three fundamental moral principles that undergird (or at least, they SHOULD undergird) our laws. It wouldn't make much sense to say on the one hand that every one of us is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them Liberty, while on the other hand saying that a man is bound to stay in a relationship that he no longer wants to be in. A man who no longer wants to attend the Catholic Church shouldn't be forced to attend it. A woman who no longer wants to live with or have sex with her husband shouldn't be forced to live with or have sex with him. The bottom line is that we shouldn't be forced to do things that we don't want to do, even if we used to like doing them, and to force a man to do something he no longer wants to do is to make a slave of him. The fact that a man used to love his government is no reason to force him to continue paying his taxes, or to obey other laws that he finds abhorrent or intrusive. Today, many people are forced to go along with and pay for things they don't approve of. "Political rape" is a good word for it. And it is this rape that self-styled "patriots" defend when they cover their hearts and say "One Nation, Indivisible".

Legal Tender, the Fed, and Fractional Reserve Banking

I am no economist, and I never pretend to be, but my simple understanding of the economy and my firm beliefs in individual sovereignty are enough fuel for me to blow up whenever I hear someone defend legal tender, or the Federal Reserve, or fractional reserve banking. These three institutions necessarily are aggressions against the individual. They cannot exist without someone being forced or defrauded into accepting something that they would not otherwise accept. You don't need an intricate understanding of stocks, hedge funds, sub-prime mortgages, liquidity, credit expansion, etc. to be able to understand that the main institutions in the U.S. economy are fundamentally immoral. All you need to know is how the main players in our economy depend on the initiation of force or the misrepresentation of fact, and that's what I'll try to show in this post.

Fractional Reserve Banking

Present practices in bank lending are necessarily fraudulent in that they give multiple people exclusive control over the same things. Let's say that you have a thousand dollars in a savings account (yes, that's not much, but that's all that some students have left when they graduate with loads of debt and no job). The bank takes nine hundred of those dollars (the reserve ratio is only 10%) and lends them out to other people, to be spent at those debtors' will. So when your $1,000 are supposedly in the bank, $900 of it is in other people's accounts, or, when they withdraw some of it, in their pockets. Nine hundred of your dollars are BOTH yours and other peoples', and they are BOTH in your account and in theirs.

There's nothing wrong with accumulating wealth by lending through a bank. It would be perfectly legitimate for a bank to accept and loan out some of your money on the express condition that you not make a big withdrawal until such-n-such date, by which time all or most of the debt would have been repayed into your account with interest. Under such a scheme, the ownership of the money is clear. It belongs to you, you're allowing someone else use it for a period of time, during which you cannot use it, after which it will be given back to you. Someone is allowed to use something that belongs to someone else, but no two people are given exclusive control over the same thing. Conventional banking is different. What typically happens is you put some money in the bank, and any time you want you can take some of it out. They might charge you extra for taking too much out, but you're still free to take it out whenever you want, as if it actually is sitting right there in your account waiting for your warm touch. And so whenever you want, you do go to the ATM and pull out as much of your money as you need to meet your expenses, and the other debtors go to the ATM and pull out as much of "their" money as they need to meet their expenses.

Let's suppose that you need alot of money right now, and so you take out 900 of your $1,000. You then have 900 of your $1,000 in your pocket. BUT SOMEONE ELSE ALSO HAS 900 OF YOUR $1,000. After you deposited your $1,000 into your savings account, your bank loaned $900 of it to another guy. So that other guy has $900 in a savings account. But he's not the only one who's keeping nine-tenths of someone else's money and calling it his. After that $900 was put into his account, $810 of it was loaned to another debtor. And after that $810 was loaned to that other debtor, $729 of it was loaned to somebody else, etc. So WHO HAS YOUR MONEY? And who does it belong to? You supposedly have it right there in your pocket, but loads of other people also have loads of your money in their accounts and in their pockets too!

No two people can have exclusive ownership over the same thing. The car that your parents own and let you drive is not yours to sell. Maybe you can have joint ownership of the car with your parents. But the car is not BOTH yours to sell AND your dad's to sell. And you can't drive it to Stanford at the same time that your dad's driving it to Berkeley. Fractional reserve banking is the practice of making money BOTH yours AND somebody else's. Suppose you were to rent a car from a car rental company, with the understanding that the car is yours to use until such and such date, and then you were to find out that the car is ALSO rented by another man with the understanding that it is ALSO HIS to use until the very same date. Wouldn't you feel ripped off? What word besides fraud can describe such a practice? Intentionally renting the same car to two different people at the same time is rightfully called fraud; but lending the same money to many different people is called bank lending.

In the good old days, when forcing people to answer for other people's malpractice wasn't smiled on, banks that borrowed and lent frivolously went under. Any time a bubble burst people would run to the banks, crowd around the tellers, and pull out all their money once they got to the window. Since only a small fraction of the money was in reserve, there wasn't enough of it to go around, and only those who got to the window first would get their money. You would be lucky if you were one of these. But if you weren't, you would find in the most sobering manner that what you thought was your money isn't there. And where'd it go? Into the pockets of those who got to the window before you did. Banks that kept too little money in reserve naturally went bankrupt. Those who call for more financial regulation correctly point out that bank runs wouldn't be a problem if banks weren't so careless about lending money. But the fundamental problem isn't that banks are borrowing and lending a lot of money; the problem is that banks are comitting fraud by giving the same money to different people and saying that it belongs to all of them at the same time. That's why -- SURPRISE! -- banks ran out of money when a lot of it was pulled out at once.

Back in those good old days, a bank could continue the fraud of fractional reserve banking only so long as the amount of money withdrawn remained below the reserve ratio (that is, so long as there wasn't a bank run). Today, however, a lovely mechanism has been set up to prevent a bank from going broke should there be any run, and so the fraud could be committed to a greater degree and for a much longer period of time, at the risk of individual depositors and the economy in general.

The Federal Reserve

When a bank starts running out of money and still needs to give more money out, it tries to get a loan from another bank. But banks can't lend any money to each other when they're all in the same predicament (and they typically are in the same predicament when they've all been running the same scam). Enter the Lender of Last Resort. WaMu doesn't have enough money to pay its depositors? No problem! The Great Lender will lend it as much money as it needs to meet its depositors' demands! Now WaMu has enough money to pay the depositors when they want their money back, and plenty left over to make more loans. And there's virtually no need to worry about the bank being unable to pay its debt to the Great Lender -- the loan was made at a very very VERY low interest rate, so the bank doesn't have to be prudish about the loans it makes to other debtors. With all this money, the bank is able to pay you your $1,000 should you for some reason demand it, the other guy his $900 should he for some reason want to borrow it, another guy his $810 should he for some reason want to borrow it, etc., all of this coming from the $1,000 you originally deposited. Since there's an unnaturally large amount of money rolling around, it's unnaturally easy to get a loan. Since it's unnaturally easy to get a loan, economic growth accelerates at an unnatural rate (and it's unnaturally easy to get loans for bad business ideas). This is the "stimulus" that Obama, Bernanke, et.al. sing about. Expand the monetary supply so that a lot of people get a head rush and buy a lot of stuff that they wouldn't buy if it weren't for a central bank propping up that fraudulent scheme called fractional reserve banking.

Central banking encourages runaway spending not just by private banks and private individuals, but also by government. When the government doesn't have enough money to fund its current programs, it borrows the needed amount from the Fed. The debt is passed on to future tax-payers, who are forced to pay these taxes that are levied onto them without any representation.

Besides propping up the fraud of fractional reserve banking and the unfair taxation of the young, central banking has another downside -- inflation. When the increase in the monetary supply is greater than the increase in goods, the value of the monetary unit (in our case the U.S. dollar) drops. You get too many dollars chasing too few loaves of bread. The $1,000 you put in your account four years ago is worth a lot less than it does now, even with accrued interest. You simply can't live off the money that you save, and any hope you had of climbing the socio-economic ladder is dimmer than it was before. Older people are unable to pay for their medicine, and poorer people can only pray that their wages rise fast enough to catch up with the rising cost of living.

Do note that there's nothing immoral about inflation per se. An alternative currency backed solely by silver (which would be a wonderful thing) would naturally devalue when a lot of silver is discovered at once. The supply of silver dollars would increase faster than would the supply of other goods, and so there would still be too many dollars chasing too few loaves of bread. The difference between this inflation and the inflation caused by the Fed, though, is that no one is forced to use the silver dollars, while everyone in the U.S. is forced to use the U.S. dollar. The people are forced to use a currency which the central planners can inflate whenever and however much they want.

Legal Tender

Competition and freedom of exchange are still popular catch-phrases in our semi-free market. But we all know that certain industries are not open to competition and free exchange. Banking is one of these industries. If we were allowed complete economic freedom, we would be free to demand repayment of our loans in the currencies that we want. But we aren't allowed such freedom. We are forced, by the state (which is a monopoly of violence), to accept payment of loans in Federal Reserve Notes. Government has effectively put a gun to lenders' and savers' heads and said "accept repayment in our currency, OR ELSE." Since we aren't allowed to demand repayment in any currency besides the U.S. dollar, we are bound to save and lend in the U.S. dollar. And since the U.S. dollar is the only currency available to us, there is no incentive for those in charge of maintaining it to regard its value. They can print as much of it as they want, without the fear that we would change all our money in the bank to a different currency.

Since the U.S. dollar is legal tender, we aren't allowed to print our own currencies to compete with it. And since there isn't any competition, we are subjected to a monetary unit whose value can drop as low as the Fed wants it to. This would not happen in a free market of currencies. No bank that constantly debases its currency would be able to last if it had to compete with banks that had more stable currencies.

Legal tender is the root of all economic woe. Without it there would be no cheap credit that results from the deliberate expansion of the money supply, and since bad ventures would be allowed to flop, there would be much less malinvestment. Without it there would be no Federal Reserve, since money can't be dumped into the market without depositors being forced to accept their savings in Federal Reserve notes. Without it the beast of fractional reserve banking would be tamed. Banks that reserve only a fraction of their deposits would have to compete with other banks that back all their demand deposits with 100% reserves, and accrue interest on savings through time deposits and not demand deposits.

That Tyrant Lincoln

Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression cannot be justified by the statist pipe dream that he “freed the slaves”. Lincoln did not end slavery. He did not abolish compulsory servitude. He universalized it when he instituted the draft. If we are to respect and uphold the individual’s right to own oneself, then we must respect this right in the means, and not just the ends. If a man should not be forced to pick cotton, then neither should he be forced to carry a gun. No talk of “sacrifice for liberty” can justify compulsory military service or civilian deaths. No one can abolish compulsory servitude by forcing a man to serve in the military. No one can abolish property in humans by shelling towns, leveling whole cities, and treating residents like commodities that can be spent. No one can rightfully force another to sacrifice. The individual should be allowed to choose whether to sacrifice, and which objects and to what degree to sacrifice. This is implied by the principle of Individual Sovereignty. Lincoln did not respect this principle. He compelled men to serve in the military and he ordered actions which resulted in numerous civilian deaths. For this he is not just a slave master, but a mass murderer.

Neither can Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression be justified by any talk of “preserving the Union”. That very principle which demands the abolition of slavery (Individual Sovereignty) also demands the right to secede. If a man should be allowed to choose whether and for whom to work, then he should also be allowed to choose whether and by whom to be governed. If we do not wish to be ruled by the government over us, we should be allowed to declare ourselves independent of it without giving up our land or leaving the country. To vindicate “preserving the Union” is really to vindicate government’s claim to ownership of your property, your body, and your life. The Union is not some venerable institution for our emancipation; it is a machine for the subjugation of the individual. No one who speaks accurately of freedom can praise Lincoln’s war to preserve the Union.